Adam Hall

Quiller, one of the last and best of espionage fiction's secret agents to have prowled the Cold War back alleys over the past quarter century, will thrill fans again with this, his 16th adventure. When a fellow agent who has called upon him for protection is murdered before his eyes, an enraged and embarrassed Quiller pressures his superiors into giving him the dead man's assignment to investigate the murder of a British cultural attache in Berlin. The murder is apparently tied to former East German national Dieter Klaus, a madman who wants to gain attention for his terrorist splinter group. Accompanied by the attache's oddly subservient widow, Quiller goes to Berlin and soon manages to infiltrate Klaus's inner circle. There he is met with an extraordinary surprise, especially startling to the reader for the almost offhand way in which it is presented (something of a Hall trademark). Klaus's plan is not fully revealed until the end, when Quiller must take a final, almost certainly suicidal step to save the day. This is a smashing entry in an always entertaining series.

n Miami, on the waterfront, a long-time agent has been turned. Quiller gets the call to find out why. It looks like a simple job. But with Quiller, nothing is ever simple. That's because he digs. He finds a gigantic conspiracy, one of global importance, with nothing less than the future of the White House at stake!

Cutting from scene to scene at a merciless pace, Quiller's new mission takes him through the semblance of a nightmare. At the very outset, his longstanding feud with the Bureau has wrecked his chances. But he can't give up the only life he knows and, in the depths of the Thai jungle, Quiller finds the first hope of a mission. 'Hi', the American said. 'It was a bomb. Body's over there, clothes blown off it, no identification.' And Quiller knows that his own body would have been here in the wreckage of the jet, if an unknown voice on the telephone hadn't warned him not to take this flight. Then he meets international arms dealer Mariko Shoda -- 'Little Kiss-of-Steel' -- the enigmatic, ruthless Cambodian beauty who becomes his most deadly opponent. My eyes went back to the kneeling woman in the temple. 'She's deeply spiritual,' Chen had told me. 'She always prays before she kills...' So begins a duel between the two of them, their arena the crowded backstreets of Singapore and the dense jungles of Cambodia. But the true battleground is in the mind. For Shoda has the face of the angel of death -- and Quiller finds a challenge in her that goes far beyond the simple desire to complete the mission. Shoda watched me with her dark eyes shimmering, the eyes of a woman in love, in love with what she was going to do. And there was nothing I could do to stop her. In Quiller's Run, the Bureau agent of international acclaim has never been closer to the brink. j

"They are specialist and each has his own method. Sorbi is a strangler but never uses his hands... Quicky the Greek uses the knife... Vincent works wild. The Japanese, Hideo, is a technician. Zotta's specialty is the miniature bomb. Kuo uses the gun." The place is Bangkok. A Very Important Royal Person is on his way for a state visit. Somewhere in the teeming city an assassin waits for him. Only one person can track him down: Quiller--cynical, a loner, a man whose file bears the 9-suffix, Reliable Under Torture, a wolf set down to track wolves.